AI War 2 v0.805 Released! “Mercs, Hacks, and, Drones, Oh My”

Right! It’s been 17 days since the last release, which is a hugely long period for us, so there’s a ton in here. Even though I didn’t personally do any of it; it’s all thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn. Huge, huge, thanks to those three for holding down the fort and getting a lot of really important stuff done.

Hacking should feel a lot more balanced now, and works on based on a new premise in terms of how strong the response is to your hacks. Before it would start out pitiful in response and then turn universe-eating without warning. No longer! A couple of hacks also weren’t working right, and now do.

Drones now actually work properly in all cases now, or at least should. They also can’t be repaired anymore, since they are finite-life ships by definition.

There were a couple of nasty bugs that Badger fixed, including a nullref that made it look like the game had frozen and might have caused some other seems-like-a-different-bug-but-is-really-the-same-thing issues.

Balance has seen an incredible amount of work thanks to Puffin and all the feedback he’s been getting. The list is really, really long. There’s so much stuff in there, but I really like the changes to make Mercenaries that you can hire a lot more durable and useful, the Astro Trains that the AI has a lot more dangerous, and Minefields and Instigator bases a lot more of a presence now.

Why the Change in Schedule?

Last time I did a release, 17 days ago, I said this: “Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We’ve been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don’t expect for that to change anytime soon.”

That… obviously had a sudden and unexpected stop. I posted about this a few days ago, in general terms, and unfortunately I can’t be more specific for privacy reasons. I want to assure you that I’m not going anywhere long-term, but my life has been absolutely turned upside-down unrelated to anything with Arcen. One way or another, my life is very different from now on, forever, compared to what it was 17 days ago.

I appreciate the words of comfort that folks have had, and those that have reached out in various ways, and overall the lack of speculation of what it is. I swear I’m not trying to be a tease about this. My natural instinct is to share and over-share what is going on with me, but there are times in life when that’s not possible or advisable.

I’ll be OK. And I plan on finishing the 1.0 of this game on schedule, and then to continue developing this game after that for a long time to come. Expansions that are paid, plus free post-launch updates, for maybe a half decade again, like what happened with the first game. But my schedule is going to be all over the place because of these recent developments, and I’m not going to be reliable on a day-to-day basis in terms of when I can do what. So expect larger releases a little bit further apart. A fair number of you have said that’s what you prefer, anyway, so I guess that’s good.

I’ll be honest: this has been the darkest, scariest time of my life. Meanwhile, things with Arcen and AI War have been going pretty relatively great, go figure. I may talk about what happened sometime in years to come, but not in any capacity sooner. At this point I have the specialists lined up who are able to help with this situation, and now it’s a matter of putting in the time and getting used to my new and sudden reality.

But please don’t let this put you off of picking up the game. I promise I’ll do right by all the fans and customers, as has always happened in the past. People freaking out that the game suddenly won’t get completed or something would only take my life from rock bottom to somewhere even lower. Please do trust me to finish what I’ve promised you, and I won’t let you down.

I apologize for being such a downer in this post, and I don’t expect to be discussing it much publicly in the future. But I’ve got roughly a 6 month period before I know at all what the shape of my future life is going to look like, so that uncertainty is going to be there chewing at me for at least that long. Despite that, I’ll do my best. I’ve been a bit slow climbing back on the horse so far, but I intend to get some proper work done this week and get a bit more momentum of my own going. Again huge thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for holding down the fort while I’ve been away. If there are other folks who want to volunteer to dig into things in that way as well, that sort of help is welcome, although I have nothing to offer in return.

Anyway — I hope you have a lot of fun with the new build, it looks pretty killer from what I’ve seen so far!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you’ll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it’s a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn’t have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that’s how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.